The Doomsday Seed Vault (more properly known as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) is now three years old and is touting its latest deposits of rare, valuable, and climate-resistant seeds. Included in the latest shipments are lima beans that can grow in very dry and in high altitude conditions (which also happen to be on the verge of extinction), cantaloupe that is blight resistant, and the progenitors of antioxidant-rich tomatoes. Fruit of several tomato lines with high beta-carotene, bred from Solanum galapagense LA0317 by J. Stommel at the USDA-ARS. Photo: C.M. Jones/Global Crop Diversity Trust/Creative Commons.

All told, the third anniversary shipments to the seed vault amount to 40,000 seed and forage samples from 94 countries. These are added to the 600,000 seed varieties already stored underground in the far Arctic north of Norway.

Interestingly, illustrating the long potential life of stored seeds, part of the shipment includes soybeans collected by USDA researchers in China in the 1920s.

Despite the doomsday moniker popularly attached to Svalbard, the world's saved collections of seeds are vulnerable to threats far short of global environmental catastrophe, as the Global Crop Diversity Trust which runs the vault touts:

A vivid example of some of the threats facing genebanks is when unrest in Egypt led to the looting of the Egyptian Desert Gene Bank in North Sinai. At the Desert Gene Bank, home to a prized collection of fruit and medicinal plants, looters stole equipment, destroyed the facility's cooling system, and ruined data that represented more than a decade worth of research.